Police want to dig up suspects

Saturday 22 December 2001 21.13 EST
First published on Saturday 22 December 2001 21.13 EST

Police are demanding new powers from the Government that would allow them to take DNA samples from thousands of corpses in a bid to solve serious crimes.

Officers under pressure from Ministers to improve on falling crime clear-up rates want to be able to take tissue from bodies where the death is investigated by a coroner.

Samples would then be fed into the national police DNA database to be checked against unidentified samples from the scenes of crimes.

The move, which has been called 'very worrying' by privacy campaigners, follows police frustration over investigations that were terminated because the culprit was already dead. Senior police officers struggling with overstretched budgets say expensive, lengthy inquiries could have been avoided if cheap, mandatory DNA tests were carried out.

Investigators face lengthy legal battles to get DNA samples from corpses, and must supply 'reasonable' proof of the dead person's guilt. The approach to the Home Office will be made early next year by the Association of Chief Police Officers, with the backing of senior officers at Scotland Yard.

'At present we can't take DNA from a corpse without getting the permission of the deceased's family,' said a senior Metropolitan Police source. 'This means that we can spend thousands of pounds investigating a crime that could have been solved by simply running a DNA sample through a computer. It means victims' families have to wait for us to solve a crime the perpetrator of which is already dead.'

Some police officers argue that perpetrators of serious crimes are more likely to die in suspicious circumstances and have their deaths investigated by a coroner, because of their erratic lifestyles.

But campaigners have questioned the legality of the proposals under human rights laws. Deborah Coles, co-director of police pressure group Inquest, said: 'This is ethically very worrying. Where does the opportunity lie for the deceased to defend themselves?'

Police have highlighted a series of unsolved murders and rapes that might have been solved under the new powers being sought.

Detectives want DNA tests to help clear up a series of rapes and murders committed in the Seventies in the Port Talbot area of South Wales. Joe Kappen, a former nightclub doorman who died aged 49 in 1990 and lived on the Sandfields and Baglan housing estates in Port Talbot, was the prime suspect.

DNA technology was not available at the time of the offences. Detectives want an exhumation order to take a sample from Kappen's corpse to match it against forensic samples from the victims' clothing.